Daniel Goodwin

Nobody needs to ask why we should read fiction by JK Rowling, or for that matter, John Grisham, or Stephen King. It would be like asking why we should listen to music or go dancing or take in a movie.

People find these writers’ fictions fun, entertaining, and refreshing like a nice cool drink. If we’re to believe the publishing statistics, it’s the literary novels that don’t go down as easily with readers anymore. These are the stories that offer us more inner character development than visible plot, more careful attention to language than rising action, more theme than chills and thrills. Most of the time anyway.

Literary fiction has become the book world’s version of fibre or Buckley’s cough syrup: awful but it works. You know it’s good for you if mostly unappealing, the kind of novels that some impractical young people study in university rather than the novels the rest of us can’t stop reading and talking about when we’re not watching or talking about Netflix.

In his wonderful new little cautionary book, Lament for a Literature, former Canadian media executive Richard Stursberg chronicles how Canada lost control of its national literature and publishing industry. Once a place where young Canadian talent could hone their skills with independent presses before being called up to the big leagues, our nation’s publishing houses are now dominated by a handful of multinationals who have no noticeable commitment to developing Canadian literary voices. Amidst his quick survey of cultural destruction, Stursberg devotes a few pages to the stark decline of Canadian literary fiction.

The crashing popularity of literary fiction has coincided with a number of technological and societal transformations. Small family-owned publishers who prided themselves on supporting unpredictable artistic experimentation have been swallowed up by big-box publishers who prefer to invest in replicable commercial successes. Social media have shredded our attention spans and film and Instagram have prioritized the visual imagination over the linguistic one.

Stursberg points out that literary fiction, once a mainstay of book publishing, has fallen from over 35 per cent of the Canadian book market in the 1990s to less than five per cent today. The gap has been amply filled by genre fiction: mysteries, thrillers, horror, romance, fantasy, romantasy. Why did this happen?

Did literary fiction alienate readers with a navel-gazing, plotless obsession with language or a dim, dull spotlight on characters who might ruminate eloquently on their feelings but never do anything suspenseful or interesting? Are there not enough car chases or bomb threats or romantic interests in the average literary novel to keep our restless eyeballs glued to the page? Does our engagement with ChatGPT or Claude offer us some competing new form of interactive fiction-making where we are both author and reader?

Some friends of mine who don’t read much fiction tell me it’s because it’s escapism. They prefer to read non-fiction to learn things. Those searching for an acceptable answer if they were ever asked at a dinner party why they read literary fiction had their wish granted over a decade ago.

The widely publicized and often-quoted study by David Kidd and Emmanuele Castano published in Science in 2013 offered the comforting conclusion that reading literary fiction improves empathy. This was tantamount to saying reading literary fiction makes us nicer people. The study assessed whether people could interpret the facial expression of others, and by extension their emotional states. Those who had just read literary fiction scored higher than those who hadn’t.

Suddenly, people who lazily preferred to while away a Sunday afternoon reading a literary novel rather than doing something productive like weeding their garden or training for a triathlon suddenly had an honourable defense: I’m becoming a better person. This was also a practical argument in favour of reading because being more empathetic would presumably improve your ability to excel at many jobs, ranging from teaching to management consulting to sales.

But three years later, another study, in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, reviewed the first study and called its research and findings into question. Suddenly, literature lost its purpose and was suspect again. Everyone could have saved themselves a lot of trouble: any quick survey of writers themselves would have found that most of them in real life were not the sweetest people. If writing literature doesn’t necessarily make you a nicer person, why would reading it?

In his Paris Review interview, a somewhat despairing Philip Roth was asked what reading does. He seemed at a loss before answering that all it does is make us better readers. Probably true, if perhaps not as inspiring as improving our ability to feel for others.

In a recent piece in The Atlantic, Adam Kirsch argues that those who try to encourage people to read based on it being good for you or even good for democracy are getting it all wrong. He writes, “It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice. This would be a more effective way to attract young people, and it also happens to be true.” He was writing about reading in general but his arguments are particularly applicable to reading literary fiction.

Kirsch is on to something, but I think there is still a moral argument for reading literary fiction buried in the idea that reading should be pleasurable. I tend to believe that reading fiction – even literary fiction – shouldn’t ever be a chore. If it’s too hard or painful, then the writer hasn’t done their job. But reading literary fiction doesn’t have to have a purpose – it doesn’t necessarily make you better at anything. And that, paradoxically, might be the whole point.

Well-crafted made-up stories about other people – some like us, others very different – that go beyond the merely thrilling or suspenseful to get under our skins remind us of our shared humanity. In the face of prevailing technologies that seek to commoditize human beings and our behaviour, to harvest our knowledge and emotions for the ends of others, reading a literary novel that unabashedly places human beings at the centre of our attention is a powerful reminder that we are not the means to someone else’s ends or purpose but rather we are an end in ourselves.

We don’t need a reason to read well-crafted made-up stories in the same way we don’t need a reason to take a walk on the beach at sunset with someone we love.